High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

I wasn’t expecting to like this book as much as I did.

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity follows the life of Rob, a man in his mid-thirties who has just gotten dumped by his girlfriend Laura due to a variety of reasons; one of which was the fact that he slept with someone while she was pregnant. Oh, and also maybe borrowed a bit of money for his declining record store which he had no intention of paying back. But, that’s the simple answer. Underneath that was his growing bitterness with the passage of time. So, Laura started sleeping with their neighbour. 

We all know a Rob. 

Joking aside, High Fidelity is profoundly self-aware, and doesn’t try to sugar coat what feels like a confessional streak of napkins in an empty bar.

Rob is unhappy, and Laura leaving was the final crack. A lifetime of humiliation comes pouring out, each misstep along the byway scabbing over and hardening into half-truth stones. What starts as a desert-island list of his top 5 heartbreaks turns into a quest to understand why they all left him.

We all carry these concealed stones that we polish time and time again, reinforcing the uneven narrative pathway we walk on.

What we learn is Rob’s inability to grow up stems from an ancient fear - the fear of dying. Watching those closest around him die, or him die, fills him with dread. The easier alternative? Not letting yourself get attached to people so their eventual pain doesn’t hurt you too.

However, that’s not how things work. Like it or not, living means attaching.

As Rob grapples with the lessons for the living, Laura’s world changes overnight as her father dies.

Suddenly, when things falls apart, everything that was looming by and large is discarded. All Laura needs is someone who knows her, whom she doesn’t need to explain anything to. Something changes in Rob as he sees Laura crumple, and he realises he wants to be the person for her. It’s by this very realisation: that enduring intimacy comes by being around the other person, and liking each other enough to keep it going.

However, it doesn’t stop him from falling for the next pretty woman who pays him a bit of attention. But, something was different this time. After playing out the crush in his mind, skipping to the parts where you’ve been together for a long time; past the marriage and the kids, to the parts where you look into the others eyes and see a lifetime lived together, the allure dissolves as quickly as it arrived. Instead, it’s replaced with the ache to go home. To Laura.

I think that’s what I find so fascinating about this text. It’s the half clutched desires in twilight that fade with the sunrise, that are more common than you’d expect, but severely underexposed.

This is my life, and it’s nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

Read in March 2026.

You know when you see T-shirts piled up in a clothes shop, beautifully folded and colour-coded, and you buy one? It never looks the same when you take it home. It only looked good in the shop, you realise too late, because it had its mates around it.

Viktor was spot on, of course; in fact, I have often been tempted to seek him out when I have been plagued by diseases of the heart. He’d be able to tell me in ten seconds whether someone was worth a tattoo or not.

Some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average ( three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty—one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first loves goes all wrong? What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?

You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlovable, somebody who could not possibly appear to anybody else at all. If you’re going to in for this stuff at all, you have to live with the possibility that it won’t work out, that somebody called Marco, say, or in this case Tom, is going to come along and upset you.

He fumbles nervously with the giant headphones, gets one side stuck around his ear, and the other side falls over one eye.

You spend Christmas at somebody’s house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown … and then bang, that’s it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins.

This is my life, and it’s nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women - or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners.

So what is it that sickens me so much about ‘Ian’ and Laura? Why do I care so much about how long he can go on for and how long I could go on for and what noises she made with me and what noises she makes with him? Just, I guess, this in the end: that I still heart Chris Thomson, the Neanderthal, testosterone-crazed, fourth—year adulterer, calling me a spastic and telling me he has knobbed my girlfriend. And that voice still makes me feel bad.

It’s only just beginning to occur to me that it’s important to have something on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you’re just clinging on. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, here in Crouch End it does. You need as much ballast as possible to stop you floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then? I’ve got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I’m in danger of falling off the edge.

A voice so deep that it seems to land with a thud on the stage and roll towards us like a cannonball.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter. … A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do.

I could see her losing interest in me, so I worked like mad to get that interest back, and when I got it back, I lost interest in her all over again.

What did “good in bed” mean in 1955? When was oral sex imported to Britain?

So what am I doing in her bed? Surely there’s a better, safer, more friendly place for me than this? But I know there isn’t not at the moment, and that scare me rigid.

What right do parents have to go to parties on Sunday afternoons for no reason at all? the hope that your past is a valid one to have journeyed away from.

You stopped making her laugh and you started depressing the hell out of her.

It’s probably only me who remember the evening before.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content, we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those stats are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

It’s often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; its as if they are under-humoured and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.

These are women who talk back, women with a mind of their own, women with snap and crackle and pop … but they are also women who seem to need the love of a good man.

I keep wanting to paraglide the the little guy: ‘I’m sorry, I’ve let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.’

They’re not really, though, are they? I know you bought them for me, and that was really sweet of you, but that was when you were trying to turn me into you.

It’s harder than I thought, though. London, eh? You might as well ask people if they’d like to take a year off and travel around the world with you as ask them if they’d like to nip out for a quick drink later on: later on means later on in the month, or the year, or the nineties, but never later on the same day. “Tonight?’ they all go, all these people I haven’t spoken to for months, ex-colleagues or old college friends, or people I’ve met through ex-colleagues or old college friends. ‘Later on tonight?’ They’re aghast, they’re baffled, they’re kind of amused, but most of all they just can’t believe it. Someone’s phoning up and suggesting a drink tonight, out of the blue, no Filofax to hand, no lists of alternative dates, no lengthy consultation with a partner? Preposterous.

I liked them more than I liked my own and, before I knew it (I never knew it, really, until it was too late), my relationship was what gave me my sense of location. And if you lose your sense of location, you get home-sick. Stands to reason.

All I’m saying is that if you believe in a long-term monogamous relationship at all, then you have to allow for things happening to people, and you have to allow for things not happening to people. Otherwise what’s the use?

her ferocity, and the way she’s always right. Or at least, she’s always right enough to shut me up.

I’m beginning to get used to the idea that Laura might be the person I spend my life with, I think (or at least, I’m beginning to get used to the idea that I’m so miserable without her that it’s not worth thinking about alternatives). But it’s much harder to get used to the idea that my little-boy notion of romance, of négligées and candlelit dinners at home and long, smouldering glances, had no basis in reality at all. That’s what women ought to get all steamed up about; that’s why we can’t function properly in a relationship. It’s not the cellulite or the crow’s feet. It’s the … the … the disrespect.

It’s easier to have parents if you’ve got a girlfriend. I don’t know why this is true, but it is. My mum and dad like ne more when I have someone, and they seem more comfortable; it’s as if Laura becomes a sort of human microphone, somebody we speak into to make ourselves heard.

So, yes, I’ve been rubbished and patronized and worried over, but there’s a glow in the kitchen now, genuine three-way affection, where previously there might have been simply mutual antagonism, ending with my mum’s tears and me slamming the door. I do prefer it this way, really; I’m happy Laura’s here.

This time, something different happens, though. I’s the daydreaming that does it. I’m doing the usual thing - imagining in tiny detail the entire course of the relationship, from first kiss, to bed, to moving in together, to getting married in the past i have even organized the track listing of the party tapes), to how pretty she’ll look when she’s pregnant, to names of children - until suddenly I realize that there’s nothing left to actually, like, happen. I’ve done it all, lived through the whole relationship in my head. I’ve watched the film on fast-forward; I know the whole plot, the ending, all the good bits. Now I’ve got to rewind and watch it all over again in real time, and where’s the fun in that? And fucking … when’s it all going to fucking stop? I’m going to jump from rock to rock for the rest of my life until there aren’t any rocks left? I’m going to run each time 1 get itchy feet? Because I get them about once a quarter, along with the utilities bills. More than that, even, during British Summer Time. I’ve been thinking with my guts since 1 was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains. I know what’s wrong with Laura. What’s wrong with Laura is that I’ll never see her for the first or second or third time again. I’ll never spend two or three days in a sweat trying to remember what she looks like, never again will I get to a pub half an hour early to meet her, staring at the same article in a magazine and looking at my watch every thirty seconds, never again will thinking about her set something off in me like ‘Let’s Get It On’ sets something off in me. And sure, I love her and like her and have good conversations, nice sex and intense rows with her, and she looks atter me and worries about me and arranges the Groucho for me, but what does all that count for, when someone with bare arms, a nice smile and a pair of Doc Martens comes into the shop and says she wants to interview me? Nothing, that’s what, but maybe it should count for a bit more.

Created by Apurva Shukla.

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